Quordle: Four Wordles in One | Hacker News Reader

Quordle: Four Wordles in One

quordle.com

369 pointsa-bit-of-code126 comments

Hi everyone I am the creator of Quordle and I am glad that people are enjoying playing it :)

I also appreciate all the feedback and I am looking to improve the experience when playing on desktop!

You can follow the @quordle Twitter for updates as well!

It's really cool! one small request: Can you switch the colors for "guessed, not in word" and "not guessed yet" letters on the keyboard? It's opposite from the original and makes it confusing.

I am working on tweaking the keyboard to be more clear so stay tuned for updates very soon around this!

I am loving this.

One thing, the position of the backspace and enter keys is the opposite of wordle and that's confusing, esp if you play both.

This is really neat. That's all I wanted to say. Thank you for building it.

I love this. Thank you for this.

One suggestion: could you put the four games side-by-side when the horizontal space allows it?

With a 1792px width (Macbook Pro 16) I have to scroll vertically to see all the games while there is plenty of unused horizontal space

Yeah I came here to say same thing. I find it hard to concentrate when bottom two boards are cutoff.

I agree. If there's empty space on the screen, you shouldn't need to scroll.

But after a practice round, I didn't need to scroll anyway because I got today's puzzle in 3/4/5/7, so whoohoo!

Amazing work. I'll be adding it to my daily routine.

First, loving this version, it's just the right amount of difficulty. It's slowly overtaking Wordle in my group.

Are the colors in dark mode different to Wordle? I find it harder to remember which gray means unguessed and which means no matches.

The keyboard doesn't display correctly with split colors on Firefox Android, but the numbers at the end do.

Lastly, the share is too large. I tend to just cut off the actual boards and just post the numbers.

Getting rid of the google tracker would be nice. I was disappointed to see the New York Times added one to the original game after they moved it.

Use adblock?

I do, which is how I immediately noticed it was there when I went to the site. I'm just not a big fan of the "I've got mine so screw everyone else" mentality and I'm happy to suggest making simple changes that will improve things for others.

Hey my partner plays a lot of quordle and had the following feedback:

Three things:

1. Love it! Thank you!

2. Could there be a better contrast between keyboard letters and the game board? They’re a bit too similar. I use dark mode, but it seems there is the same lack of definition in light mode as well.

3. Is there any way the whole game could be visible on mobile (e.g. iPhone12 Max) so the last few rows of the game board don’t need to be scrolled?

Which word dictionary did you use? I tried coding my own but was surprised as how messy all the dictionaries are.

Not OP but for my Wordle clone I used this, with some minimal manual pruning to my taste:

http://wordlist.aspell.net/

If you need CSS help or help with the responsive design, let me know! I'd be happy to help. Switched from Wordle after NYT to Quordle and definitely prefer the challenge of Quordle.

I'm getting some weird words in practice such as "FETID" and "SHALT". Is it reasonable to increase the cutoff of word usage for the dictionary?

Those are great words

What about POESY?

It rings around

A delightful sound

Need to fully visually eliminate letter choices that are no longer available to the remaining quadrant, when the others that are solved.

I like it, but too often there are words that you never use!

One of today’s words appeared recently. I don’t know how many 5-letter words there are, but I feel like the optimal time between appearances should be a bit longer. (Not to mention this word is an alternative spelling, which may be frustrating to some.)

Of all the variants I've come across so far, I think this one has the most staying power. I think I might prefer it to the original.

I do kind of wish you got one more guess, though, especially if you get stuck, like I did today, having 4 Greens but 5 possibilities for the final letter.

Would be cool to rollover the unused guesses from the solved ones to the remaining ones.

I also which it shared it simply as

Daily Quordle #22

7⃣ 6⃣

9⃣ 4⃣

vs.

Daily Quordle #23

7⃣ 6⃣

9⃣ 4⃣ quordle.com ⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜ ⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛

⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬜⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛

Maybe you could add a link if you want to expand to the second one. But it's just too long for sharing.

That's an interesting idea! It could be cool to have a share link that could rebuild the emoji grid.

4 states x 5 letters x 9 guesses is only 180 possible stoplight strings (of green/yellow/gray/black), if I'm doing my math right? So you could just pick 180 emoji and use four of them :)

I thought about this as well, but sadly, last I checked some decently popular apps (Twitter, WhatsApp, some others) don't support emojis in URL paths, only in domain names. So the emoji technique could work for message threads in some apps, but it would look pretty strange in others.

(I've been helping @DungZeekFu a bit with Quordle and am curious for any ideas around this though!)

Maybe make it so the emoji are shared without a URL, and anyone can paste the emoji into some place on the site to recreate the grids?

Well, you need 180 characters, so are there 90 good usable characters, or 60, or 45 that will work?

I’m not suggesting doing a full UTF mapping onto base64, but just 1..180 mod 3 => char base64[3] would give you 182 board positions in three URL characters.

*192, mobile typo, sorry

base64 would be pretty neat! I also wonder what non-emoji unicode characters are commonly supported in paths... If say, CJK character sets were supported by most apps, single-character paths would even work.

The number of guesses are fine IMO. While I needed one more guess, I also had made an unnecessary guess by mistake.

If you sometimes fail, I feel the balance (for you) is right =)

I could see something like this beating out the original. Wordle has to be 1x/day because there are only a couple thousand common 5-letter words (around 2300, if I recall correctly). It would turn repetitive. This game has O(N^4) combinations, so it can be played over and over.

I agree that Quordle is compelling but not sure I see your argument for how Wordle would get repetitive. 2300 is six years worth of words. They could shuffle the word list every 4 years and it’d be fine.

I think a big part of what makes Wordle compelling is the ritualistic daily nature so not seeing how this would beat it out.

BTW, I should say I have gotten it 2 out of the 3 times I've played it so far, so it's probably enough guesses, just today I really wished there was one more.

I completely agree (on the staying power). This is the only variant that's gripped me as much as the original.

I built a multiplayer version as a weekend project, would love to know what you think!

https://wordleague.xyz/

Fun!

I made one with a 5x5 square of letters, containing five words down and five across: https://squareword.org/

A bit like a combination of crosswords and Wordle, as vertical words can be used for additional clues.

This is really neat and polished!

Nice, but seems to use a fairly restrictive word list compared to other games; might make it more attractive to some people as I have friends who say that "ZA" sums up everything wrong with scrabble in one word...

Thanks for the feedback! Do you mean in the square itself or the possible guess words? Tried to calibrate the square itself for a good balance between challenge and reasonably common words.

Not the GP, but “April” isn’t in the word list.

Many (most?) word games forbid any words that are always capitalized. As either a month or a first name, April is capitalized.

Possible guess words. "unlid" and "mirly" are (possibly over-optimized) good second guesses in wordle.

That is fair! I feel like those should definitely be allowed. I am using a wordlist based on this: http://wordlist.aspell.net/12dicts-readme/ which is public domain and has about 6k 5-letter words, compared to the Wordles 12k. If anybody knows any other good royalty free wordlists I would definitely be interested. :)

https://github.com/elasticdog/yawl is fairly standard for word-games.

[edit]

Seems possible that wordle uses it given the 12k number:

    grep '^.....$' word.list|wc -l
    12036

Thank you so much aidenn0! This looks great, will integrate it in the next update.

This forces you to type extremely slowly to the point where it feels super awkward :(.

Hmm odd! Thanks for the feedback. I think it may be related to the material ripple effect on the keys. Pushed an update now that hopefully fixes it.

I've been playing this for a couple weeks now and have really enjoyed it. Well done!

Thank you! I am very glad you are enjoying it.

Really nice but... surely 'Squardle'? :-)

There was already a Squardle: https://fubargames.se/squardle/

Ah well there we go; wow that one is confusing...

edit: ...but interesting!

Yeah squardle is convoluted but feels surprisingly satisfying to solve.

It took me a few tries to get it but I'm pretty into it now.

Heh, I got this as a interview question years ago.

Given a list of words, see if there exists a valid 5x5 square of words.

I think this (squareword) would be even more fun with a toggle button to transpose the square.

Been playing this one for a while, and I love it. I know it won't always line up this way, but the other day I was able to fill in 4 remaining words with 3 guesses and finished with a score of 8, felt great.

Nice job!

One thing, I don't like that plurals are possible answers. The original let you guess plurals but no answers were plurals.

This game is pretty cool but it doesn't play well on desktops because you have to scroll to see all four words. In my opinion it would be better to have all four side by side instead of trying to fit a mobile design for desktop websites.

Should use a responsive layout.

I zoomed out.

This is getting close to by idea of "Borgle = Boggle + Wordle".

Basically the idea is there is a boggle board generated and all N-letter word paths found. The paths are made available to click on (there are a few UI approaches to this). Once a path is selected you enter Wordle mode for that path. Every guess must still be a real word, but the neat part is if you even nail a single letter, it appears on the Boggle board. And that letter immediately appears as solved on any other path that overlaps it. You can jump/revisit paths at any time.

Goal is to complete the board (unsure if there will be guess limit, letters that are not on any path of course are automatically visible/correct on game start). The completion sharing will be a matrix of numbers instead of colors showing how many guesses of that space across any path were made until the first right letter was achieved. Boggle board size configurable as is the min/max word letters (5x5 w/ only 5-letter words by default).

There are some neat strategies here of path choice/switching and guessing wrong words intentionally in overlapping paths. Will dev if I ever get the time, but feel free to steal the idea and make it.

Just wait until you try Octordle!

https://octordle.com/

That was actually really fun. I wonder at what point it stops scaling.

My feeling is that as long as I get 4 + number of boards guesses I'll always be able to solve it but maybe I'm being overly optimistic.

I run octordle, and I think you're right. I went with boards + 5 which felt like the sweet spot. Presently the win rate is 55% which seems good.

Early on friends complained it was too hard. In my experience after a few games it gets pretty easy.

interesting. but its a pain to scroll. I wish this went wide screen.

The keyboard only shows the top four boards though!

16 :) http://www.sedecordle.com/?mode=daily

Guessed in 2,4,5,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19

Up to 2315 https://polydle.github.io/

Perhaps the keyboard keys should be split horizontally, so each shows 8 colours. Being used to wordle and quordle I was a bit confused because it didn't look like one of the letters was in my word, but it was. 4,12,8,6,5,3,10,13

This was surprisingly more achievable than I thought it would be, and provides a nice challenge with some strategy.

I’m loving Quordle and the practice mode. Unfortunately practice mode has ‘stuck’ I can’t clear the board from two days ago. Any suggestions?

Maybe this takes the fun out of it, but with Quordle, I've had great success with:

TUBES

FLING

CHAMP

WORDY

With those, I've always completed all four...

I see you played the same meta-game that I did. It took me a few tries, but I ended up with: WHISK, FRONT, GLADE, BUMPY.

Probably not in the spirit of the game, but once you have 20 distinct letters, it is normally quite easy to find the solution.

Mine are SHIRT, WOMEN, BLACK, PUDGY. I like that order as it hits most of the high-frequency letters up front to enable the odd early snipe.

Well if we're sharing mine are: SPINE, WORLD, THUMB, and JACKY.

I just start with ANISE and go from there.

Mine are ANGST, PERKY, CHILD and JUMBO. It's interesting how many sets of 4 words with disjoint letters are out there. It took me quite a while to come up with my set, somehow I didn't realize there would be so many other sets that work equally well.

I have less fun with that sort of strategy (I like hard mode in Wordle). But in this variant I find it exceedingly difficult if I don't employ this sort of strategy.

I find it quite easy to beat Quordle so the challenge I aim for is trying to get all four words within six guesses. Managed it three times since yesterday. Requires some riskier tactics so it eventually broke my 30+ game streak.

As many of you I took a jab at a wordle solver. That wasn't so hard.

Then I said, how can I guarantee as a human, I win, in 6 moves almost 100% of the time?

"Quick Brown Fox", as in, use as many possible letters in the alphabet, comprised of 5 letter words, given that we have only 5 words to play with. That gives us 25 characters to use.

I came up with

BLOCK VENTS JUMPY DWARF GHAZI

this leaves out Q and X, which is fine. Using this as a template basically boils Wordle down to a anagram game, so kind of defeats the purpose.

But in this case, i was able to resolve all 4 at one time using my above combination. I guessed, correctly all 4 with PLUMB GLEAN VALID IMPLY. I then realized, you get even more chances on Quordle, but I didn't need it!

True, if you are only shooting to solve it in 9 then it can be easy with the right strategy. But many in our friend group are no longer satisfied with 9 and want 7 or fewer guesses :)

Doesn't work effectively for Quordle.

You have 9 guesses. This takes up 5 of them, then you need to be correct for each of the 4 words.

Going to echo all the other positive comments. This is the most fun variation I have played. On my first try I failed to complete it, then went and did a practice round with some smarter initial word choices and won (barely!)

Suggestion: I play and share Dordles via screenshots. I'd like to do the same with this but I don't want to use two screenshots (have to scroll down). Can you have an option to sit these side by side?

Or a “hard mode” where the four words are multiplexed. :)

I like this one quite a bit. I find Wordle fun, but a bit plain sometimes. Quordle really makes me think out of the box to optimize across the grids.

side note: I've gotten most of them, but today's ruined my streak.

I feel like todays words were designed specifically to ruin the day of the 'ROATE' users

Agree, 'STARE' is my go-to in regular wordle and this one stumped me at first. Still managed a 4/5/7/6 solve :)

Played for the first time and eventually got them all but there's nothing that says "solved" or "well done" or let's you share your achievement... What's that about?

After a few practices to get me out of hard-mode-wordle mode I have found that spending the first 4 guesses on an exhaustive search of letters (picking words with letters in common positions) seems to be universally the best opening. Pursuing individual words before 3 guesses is not optimal.

Needs work to fit above the fold on small screens. Show fewer rows of guesses, especially early.

A nice implementation, I really enjoy the practice tab. As many suggested already, it plays poorly on desktops/laptops, I have to scroll to see all four words, would be nice to see horizontally arranged windows.

Phew, 7/9/4/5. Got the last one with a pretty wild guess at the end. This was the most fun Wordle variation I’ve come across so far, will definitely come back to play tomorrow.

I like this one. I've been playing it a lot the last few days. Is it just me, or is it immensely more difficult than Wordle? I think I only get all 4 correct maybe 25% of the time.

I find it easier. My Wordle streak is 50+ (no fails yet and only one six). I was sent Quordle yesterday and got a streak of 30+ before I started trying to get the quartet in six lines which is a good challenge.

It would be wonderful if this style of game had the option to render all the letters in lowercase, my brain just seems to treat different case symbols as representing different letters.

My favorite variant yet.

I was so close, solved three and was down to two choices for the fourth (I knew four letters but there were two words and I guessed the wrong one).

I used grep to help with the searching.

Neat, but I think the keyboard coloring could use tweaking. It wasn't immediately obvious to me which were unguessed letters and which were guessed but unmatched.

What I have loved about this iteration of the idea is that I often don't solve the problem. That makes it more fun to me. I like the difficult level.

I'd like to see a cross between this and Absurdle

This is the best one so far!

This is like when I discovered calcudoku 12x12s and now sudokus are dumb and boring. Just a lot better.

May the NYT acquire you for the level-up option.

This is a nice refresh and a good challenge, especially after NYT unsurprisingly riddled wordle with trackers.

I spent way too much time playing this this afternoon. Practice mode is dangerous. Thanks, I think. ;)

I thought this was a troll game until I played it and enjoyed it thoroughly! Good job.

This feels like a cheap ripoff of Dordle: https://zaratustra.itch.io/dordle

If you're going to put your own spin on Wordle, have at it, many others have, but at least demonstrate some creativity.

Are you sure Dordle came out first? It's only a few weeks old, according to your link.

Yes? Per the "History of Quordle": https://www.quordle.com/#?overlay=tutorial

> It all started on January 29, 2022 when I saw an article mentioning Dordle by Guilherme S. Töws and we all started playing it as a group. It was a blast to play something more difficult than Wordle

Ahhh. So 2 words instead of 4. You're going to be really disappointed by Octordle and Septurdle, then.

Octordle directly stole Dordle's code, so, yeah, not a fan.

No he didn't. It's on github.

No, the creator of Dordle has not put his code on GitHub.

Why stop at four?

Next up: 10K wordle. You have unlimited guesses and must avoid guessing any word not in the final list of 10000 solution words. Your score is the number of right guesses before you miss a guess.

They didnt!

https://octordle.com/

Can you put this one in the app store?

4,6,7,9

just when I thought we couldn't imagine more wordle variants!nice :D

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